Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize for the best book on the decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas published in 2021 has been awarded to Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c.1780 - 1980 edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw (McGill-Queens University Press).
The publication results from a research process involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors and explores how close, collaborative looking can discern the traces of contact, exchange, and movement of objects and give them a life and political power in complex cross-cultural histories.
In making the award, the members of the selection committee for the Horowitz Book Prize wrote, “The volume’s editors… and its authors bring diverse disciplinary and community knowledges to the material culture of Northern North America to draw out complex, dynamic histories of Indigeneity and settler colonialism. Through their creative and provocative research into the North, its authors contribute to restoring appreciation of the arts, technologies, and agencies of peoples indigenous to a region long characterized through imperial eyes as barren and empty.”
The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize rewards scholarly excellence and commitment to cross-disciplinary conversation in books about decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas. In recognition of the editors’ outstanding contributions to the field, Bard Graduate Center will host a symposium on the subject of the book in spring 2023.
Submission guidelines are now available for the 2023 Horowitz Book Prize. Books submitted must have a 2022 publication date.
About the Editors
Beverly Lemire is professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. Laura Peers is professor emerita of museum anthropology, curator emerita (Americas collections), Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and adjunct professor in the School for the Study of Canada and the Department of Anthropology, Trent University. Anne Whitelaw is professor of art history at Concordia University.
About Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c.1780–1980
Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c.1780–1980 looks closely at the circumstances of making, use, and circulation of objects that supported and defined both Indigenous resistance and colonial and imperial purposes. Contributors re-envision the histories of northern North America by focusing on the lives of things flowing to and from this vast region between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, showing how material culture is a critical link that tied this diverse landscape to the wider world.
An original perspective on the history of northern North American peoples grounded in things, Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America provides a key analytical and methodological lens that exposes the complexity of cultural encounters and connections between local and global communities.
